Conformity In Zimbardo's 'Stanford Prison Experiment'

Firstly, while some may say that individual agency prevails in decision-making, Berger refuses optimism and feels that “possibilities do little to change the total efficacy of the system” when in general, “society penetrates the insides of our consciousness”. I agree with Berger that although the “guardians of tradition”, such as my family, friends and teachers, were influential in ensuring that my decisions are aligned to the “established rules”, they in fact need not exert much pressure on me. For instance, after my junior college, my parents told me that I had free choice over what university I wanted to enter, so long as it was reputable enough. Upon reflection, they probably did not need to say that. My years of education in what are deemed
I agree there are implicit scripts – traces left behind by the “guardians of tradition” (Berger) – that give us some sense of how to act out various roles and thus guide our behaviours in unfamiliar circumstances. When I attended my first track-and-field training, as someone who has never been on a sports team before, my response to intensive workouts issued by the coach was informed by implicit social norms. I felt that I should not vocalise my unease in order to work towards the archetype of a cooperative and motivated team-player and sports-person I often see in the movies or hear about in interviews with successful athletes. I even felt that it was acceptable to exert my body to physical exhaustion and abdominal
As such, we empowered the coach to act in our name and whip us into shape for competitions. Conversely, Dahl and Lukes’ first dimension of power would look at the coach-athlete relationship and see a successful attempt by A to get B to do something he would not otherwise do. There is a “disagreement in preferences among two or more groups”, in this case it is athletes like myself who struggle with completing the intense training against the coach. As the coach “prevails in decision-making”, it shows that he has “more power in social life”. I tend to agree more with Arendt’s perspective, since as she argues, the coach’s power to issue intensive drills “derives its legitimacy from [our] initial getting together” and “the moment the group, from which the power originated to begin with…disappears”, for instance after competition season when the group disbands to concentrate on studies, the power of our coach also